10,000 TPS per second

I ran across Kiplinger’s article and picture of “The Credit or Debit Debate Visualized” It is a very nice picture of both the usage of Credit and Debit Cards over time, as well as a nice list of pros and cons and differences between each, I encourage you to check it out for a good basic summary.

In payment systems I don’t really care as much about the type of card, Credit vs Debit at a basic level to me — one has PIN’s and requires usage of HSM’s and require real-time reversals and one uses clearing files and the other reconciliation files. But I digress.

At the bottom of the picture there are some statistics, Kiplinger being a personal finance website and not to mention various “Letters“, these are mostly consumer related, but his one caught my eye:

Which makes me chuckle because lots of prospects tell us they need a system to be able to support the worlds average TPS (Transaction Per Second), or a small fraction of.